This invention relates to managing links in a collection of documents.
Links are used in many computer applications, such as web browsers and document management applications such as the Adobe Acrobat® software available from Adobe Systems Incorporated of San Jose, Calif. A link represents a path connecting a source to a destination within or between electronic documents. A destination can be located in the same document as the source, or in a different document or other file, which can be located on the same computer as the source document, or remotely, over a network such as the Internet.
Links can occur in a variety of structured electronic documents, such as web pages, electronic books, and other structured electronic documents such as Portable Document Format (PDF) documents. For example, most web pages contain links that point users to other pages, images, or documents within a web site or to items found in other locations such as other web pages. Further, in an electronic book or “e-book,” links are often used to allow the reader to jump to different points in the text. For example, the table of contents of an e-book can contain links to the various chapters in the book enabling a returning reader to jump right to the last chapter read.
A link can be represented in various ways, including text, images and symbols. Commonly, in a visual representation of a document that includes links, sources are represented by underlined or colored text. A destination pointed to by a source can be one of many different types of files including documents, images, and URLs.